Resources

WordPress Plugins – What’s Under Your Hood?

I’ve had a few emails asking me which plugins I use for various sections of my Blog and site, so I would like to share mine today. Whats under your hood?

Advanced Category Excluder

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-category-excluder/

it can override your search results, your RSS feed listing, your category listing, and also your entry page, if you want to. This is great, for SEO reasons, for content separation, for grouping information, and handle them as real sub pages.

Contact Form 7

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Easy Gravatar

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/easygravatars/

This plugin will display gravatars for the people who comment on your posts. You do not need to modify any of your template files — just activate the plugin, and it will add gravatars to your comments template automatically.

Get Recent Comments

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date.

Google XML Sitemaps

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Most Popular Posts

http://www.wesg.ca/2008/08/wordpress-widget-most-popular/

a very simple widget that displays a link to the pages with the most number of comments. You can customize the title of the widget, the number of posts to display and comment count.

SEO Title Tag

http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plugin, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong!

Similar Posts

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/

Similar Posts displays a list of posts that are similar or related to the current posts. The list can be customised in many ways. Similarity is judged according to a post’s title, content, and tags and you can adjust the balance of factors to fit your own blog.

Sociable

http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/

Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully. While originally developed and maintained by Peter Harkins, it had seen no updates for 8 months, and it wasn’t rolled into the WordPress plugin repository, so I’ve decided to give it a new life, after being request by my friend Mel Carson to “get him some social media buttons”.

WordPress.com Stats

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

WordPress Database Backup

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

WordPress Page Navi

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/

All the information (general, changelog, installation, upgrade, usage) you need about this plugin can be found here: WP-PageNavi Readme. It is the exact same readme.html is included in the zip package.